Changes

: Well, this week flew by! I'm still working on the update. Aside from a one-day detour, the whole week has been me changing spreadsheets, playing with the changes for an hour or two, trying again, rinse and repeat. All day every day. It's not boring exactly... but it's also not interesting to talk about. So instead, let me talk about some questions and concerns players have had, both in the forum thread and via other channels. (And I'll talk about that one-day detour, too.)

: Changing Gear on the fly: one concern players brought up is that it will be harder to switch to different skill layouts on the fly. Because gear is always focused on two skills, you can't just change skills -- you'll have to change gear, too. Those little buttons next to the ability bars are going to be impractical to use because you'll need different equipment when you switch skills. This is a good point, but I have a solution that will help.

: By the way, those little buttons next to the ability bars were an experiment for newbies. Most new players seemed to stick with Sword+Unarmed (the default skills) for a very long time -- many hours -- even after they'd unlocked several more skills. As an experiment, I added those little buttons to see if newbies tried out more skills. And those little buttons definitely helped, so they were left in. (We'll try something a little more nuanced and useful in the next GUI, I think.)

: Those little buttons on the side let you switch skills, but don't make it easy to switch gear or abilities.

: Those little buttons are convenient but they were never the "main" way I envisioned people switching skills on the fly. Instead, there's a new feature called load-outs. Load-outs save the configuration of all three of your ability bars, and also save what equipment you're wearing.

: Load-outs unlock when you get your first skill to level 25.

: Load-outs work like this: once you get your first combat skill to level 25, you unlock two load-out slots. Thereafter, each combat skill you get to level 50 unlocks another slot, up to a maximum of 9. You can switch load-outs whenever you're not in combat. You can use the Load buttons in the GUI pictured above, or you can configure hotkeys to switch load-outs with a keypress.

: I'm still tweaking and improving load-outs a little bit here and there as I play with them, but they are insanely helpful for my testing, and I'm sure you'll find many interesting uses for them. I really should have added them a long time ago. I just figured it would take a lot more work than it did!

: Base Damage: we've talked about this in earlier blogs, and I'm still on the fence about the base-damage mods. For the moment, I've just made the drop-rate on base-damage mods very high, so if you're using Sword+Mentalism (for example), pretty much every sword will have +Sword Base Damage, every helmet will have both Sword and Mentalism base damage, and chests will have Mentalism base damage. This solves the problem of "I need these mods and I can't get them easily enough", but the opposite problem is also a thing: "I use psychology for healing and I don't want +Psychology Base Damage if it means I have less healing!" So ... it's a work in progress. I've experimented with a few replacement ideas but nothing has clicked here yet.

: Combos: combos have always been a balance problem because they are either too annoying to use or too powerful. In other words, they're too much trouble to keep track of, so unless the effect is REALLY good, players don't use them. I've been iterating on this problem each time I have a chance to revise treasure, and I'll continue to do so. There was a suggestion to broaden more combos to use "wildcard" steps, and I think that's worth trying, so I'll change a bunch of the combos to have more generic steps in between, such as "Fireball + * + * + * + Fire Breath = combo", where * could be any kind of ability. We'll see how it feels, and iterate more from there.

: Combat Refresh: several players wanted to avoid having to use basic attacks to trigger combat refreshes, instead adding the combat-refresh power to their favored ability. But that goes against the goal of making you use more abilities in combat! I want you to use a lot of abilities, and my metrics suggest that very few players -- like, almost no players -- use all twelve abilities on a regular basis. So you have slots you aren't using already. I'm adding basic attacks to each skill, so you'll always be able to put the basic attack on either bar -- wherever it fits. Since you weren't using all your ability slots anyway (statistically speaking), this shouldn't cause too much hassle.

: And the big upside of pushing players to use a Basic Attack is that it adds some much-needed consistency between skills. And that lets me add more interesting treasure effects. I'll show you what I mean in the next blog post, if some of these ideas pan out, but the point is that when everybody has something consistent, like a basic attack, I can add interesting things that tie into it and let your two skills interact.

: Multi-Skill Gear Effects: one suggestion that came up a few times was to do multi-skill treasure effects. And I definitely want to do a LOT more of these! (See the discussion of basic attacks above.) The most obvious way to implement it, though, has already been tried and doesn't work. For instance, a treasure effect that says "<ability from skill X> and <ability from skill Y> deal +50% damage" is only satisfying for people who happen to use both of those abilities. Players know that the ability's potency is a little watered-down because it can apply to both abilities, and they hate the feeling of "wasting" their potential. Even if the damage isn't watered down at all (which is only possible in certain circumstances), players don't seem to like them anyway, presumably because it still seems like it would probably be weaker.

: In short, yes, making treasure synergize between multiple skills is definitely a goal. But it's a long-term goal. It will take more iterations to find the most successful ways to do it. In the next update I'll just change a few treasure effects to work this way so you can give feedback on how it feels and we can evolve it further.

: Transmutation permanently locking in two skills: In an earlier blog post, I explained that the transmutation table will start to "enforce" the two-skill breakdown on gear, and it was asked if that was permanent or just transitional. In case it wasn't clear, yes: it's permanent. Otherwise, players would just use Transmutation to make single-skill gear again, undermining the whole point of this change. However, there will be a separate table that can help you cheaply adjust your existing Legacy gear, and THAT table is probably temporary.

: On lowering the number of total treasure effects: I think the number is good where it is. For most skills there's really only about ten treasure effects per gear slot. That means that two-skill gear is only pulling from a pool of twenty or so effects. And if you're transmuting, you're pulling from a pool of only ten effects! (On average.) So the odds are already pretty great for transmuting a specific effect you want. Now, lots of the current treasure effects would never be desired by power-players, and I want to improve those. But throwing them out isn't improving them.

: Iterating vs. Starting Over

: That's not to say I don't like reading new design suggestions! I can often take parts of those and apply them to existing designs, or use them when I make the next new skill or ability. (There are several more entire combat skills to add, along with a bunch of variant skills... but I'd like to get the existing ones working better before adding even more data to my gigantic spreadsheets.)

: Playstyle choices: The idea behind this complaint seems to be that players liked focusing on just one skill, and by removing that option, I'm removing choices. But that's not true. The number of choices is exactly the same, actually. Right now, you could say "I want to focus all my gear on Archery", OR you can say "I'll focus on both Sword and Archery". That's two choices... but one is dramatically weaker than the other. After this update, both options are still open to you. If you want to focus only on Archery, go right ahead. Use only Archery and Generic treasure effects. You will probably be weaker than somebody who focuses on two skills and does a good job synergizing their gear... but so what? One of the two possibilities was already weaker. I just changed which is which. And I did that because I know that two-skill builds will hold players' attention a lot longer than single-skill builds.

: Most players will gravitate to gameplay styles that are easiest. (That's just human nature: smart people find the path of least resistance to getting what they want, whether it be in a game or in real life.) In fact, in an MMO, this is often a very big problem because even players that want to try weird ideas often feel "obligated" to follow the easiest path due to peer pressure. If your friends are all using a build that's vastly better than your build, you'll feel pressure to change toward their builds, even if you were having fun with your slower build. And there's no way to avoid that pressure -- I can't make all play styles equally easy and equally powerful. Instead, my job as a game designer is to make sure that the "easy" path is the one I think is most fun, in the long term. Speaking of which...

: On making the game "less fun": This concern is sort of similar to the last one, but it's a little meatier. The idea here is that it's fun to be able to kill monsters with just a few button presses, so my push for longer combats with more combat-actions makes the game less fun. And that is ... true. For a little while. But not for thousands of hours of gameplay.

: Another example of "removing fun" is that I'm eventually going to remove the ability to run really fast during combat. It's a lot of fun to outmaneuver monsters, racing past them, shooting them in the ass as they desperately try to regroup, then doing the same thing again and again. But it's not sustainable for thousands of hours of gameplay. I can add trick monsters, like ones that stun at long range, but a trick monster is a special case. Special cases can't be the core of gameplay.

: Play-tester burnout: In the past, a few play-testers have quit each time I make big changes like this, because they're nerfs. That's always a danger when you nerf something: players feel personally slighted, like you just shat on their ice cream cone. They are now having less fun, and they don't have to take that kinda shit from a game, so they go play something else. Nerfing something after a game launches is a very hard call. Sometimes you really need to do it, but you agonize over it, because who wants to lose players?

: Anyway, based on some of the feedback I've received this week, I can't say I'll be surprised if some players quit over this change. I hope you find fun elsewhere, and can come back and try out the final game. But I do hope that most of you will stick with it to get past any disappointing first impression of "nerf", and can help me make this design work!

: Lots More to Do

: Please have patience, and please keep communicating!

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